Friday, June 2, 2017

album review: Elvis Costello cracks a smile

(This review originally printed in the UCSD Triton Times in 1980. Not that I've become a paragon of flowing prose since that time, but anyone half way familiar with my style might note be this piece's tone, which is that of bright boy who wanted to sound better read than he actually is. Lucky for me that the music was as good as I claimed it was. -tb)

GET HAPPY!! --Elvis Costello and the Attractions

As a seeming majority of music critics, reviewers and assorted ill-cultured taste mongers have exhausted their supply of superlatives in justifying rock critics defending their declaration that The Clash'sLondon Callingrecord the hottest double record set
sinceExiles On Main Street,
I've been tempted to retaliate with my own half facetious declaration. Elvis Costello's
new record,Get Happy!!(I would have written) is the greatest
double rock record sinceBlonde
On Blonde. With the gauntlet thrown to the floor, warring factions would
man the ramparts and try to pick each other off with sniper-tongued pot-shots. Nonsense
on two counts. First, despite the fact thatGet
Happy!!contains 20 songs, it
is in fact a single record with 10 selections per side, where Dylan's double
setBlonde On Blonde,
with several songs going well over three minutes, holds less material. More
importantly, however, is the nonsense rock reviewers in general (myself
included) indulge in when they sling about comparisons that pale once separated
from the heat of the moment. Common sense and sober thinking shows that the
Clash are an earnest band who haven't developed the stylistic subtleties that
the Stones used to manage, and that Costello, apart from a shared genius for
non-sequiturs, has little in common with Dylan. This brings us to whatGet Happy!!really is: neither a masterpiece nor a
landmark to be prematurely canonized, but instead a firm confirmation of the
major talent his audience suspected he possessed.

The
major revelation onGet
Happy!!is that Costello,
like many had hoped, has transcended the slight trappings of new wave and has
become a songwriter, an artist with a firm grasp on his material who can write
songs using an encyclopedic array of song styles to their full measure. The 20 songs
onGet Happy!!comprise, something of a brief course
in the history of pop music style. Costello, it should be pointed out, is
hardly a new wave dilettante who plagiarizes other people's art because he's
unable to develop his own voice. Rather, Costello shares methodological
affinities with the patron saint of the French New Wave film school, Jean
Luc-Godard. Godard, who through his young life had been surfeited with American
genre films by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller and other
Hollywood directors, took to making his own films during the late 60s, using
many of the same camera stylistics of his American influences. Godard, aware
that he was a French intellectual first and that he couldn't make
"American" films no matter how much he admired the visual
gracefulness American directors occasionally managed, ended up subverting the
genres, inserting heavy doses of philosophy, Marxist literary criticism,
semiological dissertations on language, and other notions stemming from the French
proclivity for spinning theories, concepts that Godard's American film
influences would doubtlessly stand gap-mouth at. Film genres to Godard, then,
were a medium he could use, alter, retool, change, subvert.

Costello
is a songwriter of course, and one wouldn't belabor a comparison between him
and Godard beyond a simple point: like Godard, Costello shuffles music styles
and makes use of them the wayhewants. He does this through his
lyrics, which along with Steely Dan's are the most disturbing, dense and
difficult in rock. Often times, Costello enjoys writing a lyric with no literal
meaning against a melody that evokes something else entirely. In
"Secondary Modern," with a soft croon over a melody that could pass
for some of the blander efforts of Jackson Browne, Costello sings:"This must be the place /
Second place in the human race / Down in the basement / Now I know what he
meant / Secondary modern / Won't be a problem / Til the girls go home..."The melody, as pleasing as anything
else could be, says one thing, but the lyrics, full of sparse details and
indirect innuendo, deny that pleasure. Costello's aim seems to be to set us up
in the visceral plane, and then to pull the rug out from under us once the
words sink in. Dangerous activity.

Lack
of space makes it impossible to go into a song-by-song account, but here are
some of the choice tracks. "Motel Matches," set in a gospel vein, is
abstracted teenage heartbreak, an implied story of a lover's concern for his
girlfriend's loose ways. "Opportunity," a jaunty tune in a stiff
gallop tempo that concerns, incredible enough, the Hider and Mussolini baby
boom campaigns. "Man Called Uncle," is an excellent hard rocker where
Costello condemns beautiful people who've resigned their free-will so that they
could become mere sexual play things to rich people, and expressing a tacit
yearning for real love without usury.

Costello's
main theme throughout is that he's against anything that keeps people from
becoming the human being he'd like to see them become, against those
institutions that divide people, denatures them, turns them into a mindless
horde that consumes, kills, and continually destroy each other.